7 Entrepreneurial Leadership Workouts: A Guide to Developing Entrepreneurial Leadership in Teams

By Stephanie Jones and Martin Tynan

This book features a series of muscle-developing workouts/exercises for entrepreneurial leaders and their teams wanting to develop fitness, strength, endurance, agility, leanness, flexibility, suppleness, and the ability to cope with adversity and to be resilient - a series of vital requirement in the process of adapting to “the new normal” demanded by our fast-changing world. In particular, these workouts are designed to enable entrepreneurial leaders and their teams to scale up transitional business ideas and innovative business concepts from the start-up phase to long-term sustainability. This muscle-power is also needed by organisations that are having to revisit or rework their established business models to adapt to the extreme volatility that is currently reshaping the business landscape. Based on Martin Tynan’s doctoral thesis, adapted from his leadership change and evolution model and including the consulting experience and MBA teaching background of best-selling leadership author Stephanie Jones, the authors show how to build muscle to achieve business growth and how to sustain that growth not just for you but for your team.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Dec 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781839981869

Book preview

7 Entrepreneurial Leadership Workouts

7 Entrepreneurial Leadership Workouts

A Guide to Developing Entrepreneurial Leadership in Teams

Stephanie Jones and Martin Tynan

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2022

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

Copyright © Stephanie Jones and Martin Tynan 2022

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021948595

ISBN-13: 978-1-83998-184-5 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-83998-184-9 (Hbk)

Cover credit: Powerful business female as company leader with confidence strength tiny person concept. Businesswoman power with boss muscles and successful work achievements vector illustration. Woman leadership. By VectorMine/ Shutterstock.com

This title is also available as an e-book.

Contents

Acknowledgements

■  ■  ■

Introduction

1

Workout 1: Letting Go of Autonomy – from Founder-Led to Team Leadership – and Beyond

2

Workout 2: Anticipating Future Problems – from Solving One at a Time to Coping with Many – from the Here and Now to the Future

3

Workout 3: Changing Your Focus – from Being Customer-Driven to Problem-Solving 360° – from Looking Outside to Looking Inside

4

Workout 4: Allowing for Role Evolution – from Lack of Role Clarity to Role Definition

5

Workout 5: Coping with Risk – from One Single Point of Failure to Juggling Several Products, Processes and People Issues – Understanding Systemic Risk

6

Workout 6: Managing Culture Change – Understanding Person–Culture Fit from an Additive Start-Up to Matching the Values of a Sustainable Business

7

Workout 7: Building a Growth Mindset – from Start-Up to Sustainable Growth

8

Bringing the Workouts to Life

Conclusion: Keeping in Shape: An Ongoing Process

■  ■  ■

References

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank – collectively – the Maastricht School of Management faculty and staff for making the experience of working on Martin’s doctoral degree so pleasant for both of us as supervisor and supervisee. Also the interviewees – entrepreneurial leaders mostly in high-technology businesses in London – who helped Martin so much at this point with their candid and insightful remarks. Then Claudia Huerta – an MBA student at Maastricht School of Management – who took very seriously Martin’s ideas for future research on the last page of his DBA thesis and internationalised the project in her MBA thesis paper. In that process we must thank the very many interviewees from all over the planet who contributed to Claudia’s research – and therefore also to the present book. We would like to gratefully acknowledge the input of Emilie Morrow, a master’s student of entrepreneurship at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, who not only used her exemplary editorial skills to enhance the manuscript but also reflected on the value of the book for herself and fellow students. Also, Roy Arets – a master’s student of management, change and consultancy at Maastricht University – helped with sourcing examples of entrepreneurs, marketing ideas and illustrations, and played a key role in focusing on the utility of the book for students as well as practitioners. We are also grateful for the wise comments from our reviewers. Prof. David Bevan used the book as a distraction during the pandemic-enforced lockdown, and Prof. Edward Buckingham as light relief whilst marking the efforts of his students at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Our practitioner reviewers, including Tom Jackson of Smart Law and Pardus Bloom (through whom we met Emilie), helped us to see the book through the eyes of a different yet essential audience for us. We would also like to thank Tej, Megan and Courtney at Anthem Press. And last but not least, our long-suffering other halves who have become used to our long hours of absence whilst at the laptop, and especially Martin’s children, who remain totally unimpressed.

Introduction

So, for me personally, the starting point is just thinking about leadership as a skill that can be developed, or a muscle that can be developed, and then taking action to do that.

– An entrepreneurial leader interviewed for this book

Background to This Book: How It Started

The genesis of this book lies in both authors’ interests in leadership – and specifically entrepreneurial leadership. One of the authors has a strong grounding in academic research and the other has spent over twenty years working with technology organisations as they have grown and scaled globally. So we have tried to combine theory and practice!

The original material for this book formed part of the doctoral thesis of our practical author, supervised by the academic. Looking at the task of leading the journey from a start-up business to a scaled-up operation, the thesis investigated how and why entrepreneurial leadership practice evolves as the organisation grows, specifically in technology-focused organisations.

The outcome of this doctoral thesis (Maastricht School of Management (MSM), April 2020) was a tentative predictive framework analysing the motivations, roles, behaviours and context of entrepreneurial leadership – and how and why these change and evolve as an organisation moves from start-up to scaled-up. The whole idea was to look for trends and patterns, to give insights to would-be entrepreneurial leaders and their investors. This framework – based on extensive research with entrepreneurial leaders across Europe, North America and South America, and supported by interviews from a selection of worldwide locations (including India, China and the Middle East, researched by MSM MBA student Claudia Huerta, September 2020) – has been further developed and honed to focus on seven key ‘workouts’ which entrepreneurial leadership teams need ‘to go for and train for’ as they work and strive to take their nascent start-ups to more scaled-up operations.

There are obviously many factors involved in this process of a business moving from this embryonic stage to a mature operation – beyond the immediate issue of leadership: the product or service itself, the nature of the market opportunity for the product or service, the timing of market entry, the funding of the organisation and so on. Additionally, a key part of this is the capability and ability of the organisation through its people – not just the founding leadership team, but the employees in the company – to also scale and grow. It could be argued that one of the most important factors in the scaling and growing process is the competence and motivation of the individuals within the organisation. Yet, this issue of human capital, so often identified as the key component of driving organisational growth, does not even have a name on the company balance sheet, and if it does, it is lumped under ‘intangibles’!

As mentioned above, one of the key audiences for the present study has been identified as the investors-in-start-ups community – and increasingly they are showing more interest in the ‘leadership’ element which drives the creation (or in some cases the destruction) of these ‘intangible’ elements of a company’s value. At the same time, there also appears to be a lack of confidence in the ability of investors to assess leadership capability, yet anecdotal research shows that when making investment decisions, investors place around a 30–50 per cent weighting of that investment decision on the ‘leadership strength’ of an organisation, however that is defined.

Financial measures (revenue growth, customer numbers, amount of dollars in market opportunity, etc.) on how to predict the likely success of a company have always existed in analysing company value. These measures can be used by the current and potential stakeholders in a start-up organisation as a way of assessing the likely future success of this business from start-up to scaled-up mode.

However, investors and stakeholders are showing increased interest in identifying a method to measure the more ‘intangible’ aspects of a company’s potential growth. A significant part of these intangibles includes current and future leadership capability and competence. This is of particular interest to investors, when more and more of the intangible value of an organisation, and the ability to grow from a start-up to a scale-up organisation, is undoubtedly related to the success or failure of the founding leadership team.

The purpose of this book has therefore been to focus on a specific aspect of these ‘intangibles’ – the capability, competence and skill set of the entrepreneurial leadership team. What is the collective leadership ‘muscle’ needed to grow, develop and scale the organisation? Which particular ‘muscles’, and how can they be identified, developed and exercised? And in the process of doing so, the focus of the present study is to provide ideas, strategies and tactics to offer tangible support to entrepreneurial leaders/founders, investors, employees and other stakeholders in the business. The objective here is to pinpoint some of the key capabilities, competencies and skill sets of entrepreneurial leadership which can have a direct impact on enabling the business to grow, develop and scale up to achieve its potential and sustainable future.

Furthermore, having identified these capabilities, competencies and skill sets – the ‘organisational muscle’ as we have described it – this book then provides a series of ‘workouts’ to help the leadership teams in the organisation to grow and develop this muscle power. In doing so, they will enable the entrepreneurial leadership team to grow, develop and scale up the organisation, in a much more systematic, measurable and specific way – a bit more like the financial measures!

Why Does This Matter?

Although many observers argue that start-up organisations are important for creating job opportunities, it is the ‘scaled up’ organisations that actually make more career opportunities on a larger and sustained scale and drive economic growth within countries, especially for the future. Particularly high-growth, sustainably scaled-up businesses are widely seen as supporting economic resilience, especially in challenging times – now reaching a crescendo as this book goes to press (October 2021). The current need for economic recovery, let alone growth, is more desperate than ever. The takeaway here is that although there is no issue with the number of start-ups right now – there are very many – the challenge is how to get some of these companies to scale up? To not just survive, but thrive? Especially at a time when many new innovative start-ups have emerged in the totally volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous (VUCA) era of the early 2020s – but how many will last?

For every Amazon, Facebook, Netflix and Google there are literally thousands of small start-ups trying to ‘scale-up’ to become the next Slack, Zoom or Uber. Less than 1 per cent of these start-ups will make it to the big time. For would-be entrepreneurs, for employees working in a start-up, for an investor – how to tell if the business-in-the-back-bedroom will ever see its name in lights? Does the entrepreneurial team in question have the required ‘muscle power’ to succeed? Of the huge array of start-ups founded each year, how do investors increase their chances of backing the one in a thousand that will become a scaled-up company? How can an investor talent-spot entrepreneurial muscle power? Many would-be founders have a view to setting up new business ventures, spurred on by opportunities presented by the changing world. Given the current environment we are experiencing, this will no doubt spur on new start-ups being founded to address new challenges or opportunities in the market or to address current challenges or opportunities in a different way. It can easily be argued that the rate of start-ups during the totally unpredictable world of the 2020s continues to increase day by day. Given that this uncertainty and need for adaptation, and the response of entrepreneurial leaders to this, are such key drivers of organisational scale-up success, how can stakeholders in an organisation increase and work on the ‘organisational muscle’ that will improve the chances of their start-up organisation succeeding to scale up where other scale-ups will disappear?

Here, we argue that it all depends on whether these founders have this special entrepreneurial leadership muscle – or if they can see it and nurture it in others. As entrepreneurs, how can these founders identify, develop, build and use this necessary ‘muscle’ to make things happen in a sustainable way? As investors, what are the readable signs of ‘muscle power’ amongst the entrepreneurial leaders passing the radar screens? How can they screen in and screen out?

The Start-Up Situation: The Anatomy of the Entrepreneurial Leader

At its simplest level, there are two types of entrepreneurs: those who are necessity-driven and those who are opportunistically driven. For the purposes of this book, we will differentiate between the two, focusing on the latter.

Necessity-driven entrepreneurs are those who have no choice or limited choices in how to make a living. These are often seen (but not exclusively) in countries with less mature economies and economies that do not provide a decent social security safety net. A good example of this might be street hawkers or traders in less developed countries. They are not always sole traders/entrepreneurs/businesspeople out of choice – often (but not exclusively) it is out of necessity. They work at their job because they need to.

Opportunistically driven entrepreneurs are often those who by choice or design decide to set up their own business – and thus establishing their organisation or joining a recently established organisation as a leader at a relatively early stage in its life cycle – and they become entrepreneurial leaders. They typically have other opportunities/choices open to them and are making a conscious choice to become opportunity-driven entrepreneurs.

For the purposes of this book, we are focusing on those who are in the opportunistic bucket. Given that they usually have different options about their career choice, or how they earn a living, the motivation of entrepreneurial leaders in their choice is an important point as we look to organisations to further develop and grow their ‘muscle’. Entrepreneurial